Ian Rickson: Sex, lies and Pinter

His Jerusalem is a Broadway hit – now director Ian Rickson is back with a star-studded Betrayal. He talks to Andrew Dickson about his debt to Pinter, coaching PJ Harvey – and why he's finally ready for Shakespeare

'I've been very lucky' … Ian Rickson. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Never let it be said that Ian Rickson lacks range. This week, the director opens a new production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, starring Kristin Scott Thomas; it turns out that he has also found time to direct PJ Harvey's current tour. "We talked about staging and lighting, should she talk between songs, things like that," he explains, before adding, not wanting to take too much credit: "Director in inverted commas."

Not everything Rickson has done has been a success: his 2009 Hedda Gabler with Mary-Louise Parker left the American critics cold, and not everyone thought Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour was a play worth reviving (even with Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss in the leads). Still, whichever guardian angel is looking after him has obviously been putting in overtime. "I've been very lucky," he agrees, clutching his mug of tea, his deep hazel eyes and shaved head making him look, for a moment, almost boyish. "I don't take anything for granted."

Jerusalem's success, though, must feel sweet, proof positive of Rickson's philosophy at the Royal Court: to nurture playwrights, ensuring they weren't one-hit wonders but could produce a substantial body of work. He gave Simon Stephens (Punk Rock, Harper Regan) a job as resident dramatist so that he could quit schoolteaching, and embedded scripts by international playwrights in the theatre's main space. His legacy lives on in the writers he directed (Roy Williams and Conor McPherson among them), in his impassioned championing of Sarah Kane's work, and also in the talented generation who have since graduated from the theatre's young writers' programme: Lucy Prebble (Enron), Polly Stenham (That Face) and Laura Wade (Posh).

Jerusalem was Rickson's sixth collaboration with Butterworth. The play began life in 2003, was heavily revised the following year, and then frantically rewritten even as it went into rehearsal in 2009. (After its transfer to the West End, the writer bought the director a long-promised new bike, a thank-you for his patience.)

Was Rickson always sure it would come good? "I saw so many great new plays missed [by the critics], so I never direct a new play thinking it's a dead cert. But I had a plucky confidence about what Jez was channelling." He goes on: "I've just come back from seeing it in New York, and you've got elderly ladies with hearing aids giggling away at the most profane bits, engaging with what should be on BBC Points West, appreciating the nuances of English mythology." Film stars have liked it, too. "Ethan Hawke was saying that he would love to star in an American adaptation. We have an ongoing joke about him, about doing it somewhere like Austin, Texas." Might it happen? He grins. "Who knows. Jez would need to do a lot of translation."

Staging Pinter repays another kind of debt. The pair first met in 1993, and 13 years later Rickson directed the playwright in what would become his final appearance as an actor, a ferociously exact version of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. "Directing him was exciting but challenging," he recalls. "Partly because of his ill health, partly because of how intense and deep that play is. It would be the only thing I would think about from 6am each day: how is Harold, how's it going to be today?" Does he miss him? "It's a way of me keeping close to him, to do a play like Betrayal. When he died, [playwright] Patrick Marber said to me: we've got to use everything we learned." Why does he think they got on? "I remember him saying once that he admired my bluntness. From Harold, that was a compliment."

One of the riddles of the play is its relationship to Pinter's own life, born out of the emotional chaos that followed the collapse of his first marriage, to actor Vivien Merchant, and his affair with journalist Joan Bakewell while she, too, was married. In Rickson's staging, the first production of the play since Pinter's death, Scott Thomas plays Emma, trapped between her marriage to Robert and her affair with Jerry, two men who happen to be best friends. The play teeters on a knife-edge of who knows what, and when – not least because its scenes are arranged so they run backwards in time, from the breakdown of the affair to an illicit first kiss.

Pinter's death has made some of these questions less awkward to explore. Rickson and his cast have consulted Bakewell for her perspective (which was? "I guess . . . it's quite complicated," he hedges), and spoken to Pinter's widow Antonia Fraser, whose recent memoir shone fresh light on this period (the couple were living together while he was writing the play). "I like mining all that biographical stuff," Rickson says. "It's the first play he writes after the breakup of his marriage, it's the first play he writes after he meets Antonia. Perhaps a fragment of something she says might be something we can use. I'm hunting for clues all the time." The fact that Fraser suggested Pinter write one of the pivotal scenes, in which Emma challenges Jerry to leave his wife, was a revelation, he says. Rickson even invited a Yeats scholar to visit rehearsals, hoping for further input – even if, by my count, the poet is mentioned on just three occasions.

'The bullets are pinging off you'

Now that Betrayal is at the fine-tuning stage, Rickson has begun researching Hamlet, starring Michael Sheen, which he will direct at the Young Vic in London this autumn. He is assiduously watching films of different versions, and working his way through a thick stack of critical studies. Their approach will be psychological, he hints. "There's something really disturbing in the play about the madness of blocked grief, and Hamlet's inability to grieve – this disturbed, entrapped feeling. How to execute that, I'm not sure." At 47, it's his first ever Shakespeare, which must be some kind of record among British directors ("Don't report me," he smiles).

He has also recently completed a short film with Butterworth – The Clear Road Ahead, for Film Four, a story about a businessman who undergoes a kind of primal transformation in the woods – and is eager to do more screen work, if he can find the right script (though Jerusalem, he insists, will not be it: "We don't think it would be better than the thing that happens on stage"). And he has been making up for lost time with his family; he has a 10-year-old daughter with theatre director Polly Teale, and a son in his mid-20s.

Does he miss the very different challenges of running a theatre? Rickson offers a stout defence of his own record at the Royal Court, and is effusively supportive of his successor, Dominic Cooke. But you sense it's a relief to be allowed to obsess about the interesting things, about Yeats and Harold Bloom's take on Hamlet, instead of management meetings, fundraising and toilet refits. "You put your tin hat on and your medals, and you march through the rain and the cold, and the bullets are pinging off you," he says of that period. "When you leave, you sleep better and you're more human."

He has no urge to run another theatre: more Broadway is tempting; life as a freelancer suits him just fine. He must be having the time of his life, I suggest. He looks unconvinced. "But you're on your own, in the dog-eat-dog world . . . " Working on Betrayal, going back to Pinter, has been a soul-searching exercise, he says. "He takes you to the edge of a precipice and makes you look down. But that's the stuff of life, and that's the privilege of my job."

• This article was amended on 15 June 2011. The original referred to Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser meeting during the writing of Betrayal. This has been corrected.